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Friday, July 13, 2012

The Search for True Love (Part 7)

In this section about working on you so far, I’ve been
writing about the easier to understand external part of you that you need to
work on. For those of you who believe
you are more spiritual, I need you to bear with me because I will in later
sections be getting into the inner parts and deeper parts that we need to work
on. For now, I ask you to pay attention
to the external that we ALL need to work on as I am explaining here, because it
is often the spiritual ones who neglect the outer parts in the name of being
“spiritual”.

Frank is a friend of mine who tends to be attracted to girls
who look nice and dress nicely.
However, he is the type of guy who doesn’t have a clue about how to
dress and he doesn’t put any effort into figuring out how to match his
outfits. At one time, he complained to
me after he was rejected by the thousandth girl why these good-looking
well-dressed women don’t like him back.

Since we have known each other for such a long time, I did
not hesitate to tell him that he need to put some effort into dressing himself
better. I told him that he needs to
dress better to accentuate his looks.
His natural looks are being hidden underneath his distractingly
mismatched outfits. Also, he is a nice
guy underneath the badly dressed surface.
He needs to sprinkle some good flavoring on the outside to enhance the
nice guy that he is underneath.

This is common sense to many of you. If you want to attract someone who is
well-dressed, you naturally need to be well-dressed yourself. However, Frank who is too lazy to work on
himself in something as simple as his outer appearance responded, “They have to
accept me as I am. I am not going to
change.”

It almost sounds like a legitimate excuse to continue in his
frustration of repelling the good looking women he is attracted to. However, it is not a legitimate excuse,
because his mismatched outfits are not who he is. I know him very well and he is a nice guy who
is hardworking and generous, and he is also seeking a spiritual connection with
God. I am not telling him to change who
he is. A nice guy seeking spirituality
is who he is, and I am definitely not telling him to change that. I am just telling him to change his
mismatched outfits and stop using “being myself” as an excuse to take the easy
way out when it comes to grooming.

Although most of you (especially women) understand this,
there are some of you (usually male) who obstinately cling to the excuse of “I
am going to be myself.” Well, I am not
saying to not be yourself. What I am
saying is to be the best you possible, inside and outside! Stop using “being myself” and “accepting me
for who I am” as an excuse. If you are
honest with yourself, you are using that as an excuse to continue with your
laziness in not keeping up with your appearances.

Okay, let me really drive this point home with a more
extreme example. Take the case of the
slob who doesn’t bathe regularly, who doesn’t brush his teeth daily, and who
smells really bad. He in defense says,
“They have to accept me for who I am” while complaining, “Why are women not
attracted to me?” Well, the absurdity of
this excuse of “being myself” should be obvious to every one of you by
now.

It’s not that he is being himself, but he is being the worst
him possible, or the least presentable him.
Well, as ridiculous as this slob’s excuse is to everyone one of us who
hears this, Frank (although not as extreme as the case of the slob) is just as
ridiculous in using the same excuse.

As someone who has been developing spiritually for at least
two decades, let me now speak to you who are fellow Christians and spiritual
beings. Some of you declare to
yourselves and others that it’s not important to develop and maintain your
physical being and external appearance.
Your justification is that you only focus on the “spiritual.”

Imagine yourself as the keeper of a Church or Temple of
God. Now, as the keeper or steward of
God’s Temple, would you neglect the physical appearance and state of the Temple
and allow it to become run down. Would you
let things be broken and not be fixed?
Would you leave it with a leaky roof and broken stairs? Would you let it be infested with roaches and
rats? After all, it’s the spiritual that
matters. The physical doesn’t
matter. Most of us in response to that
would say, “That’s absurd!” You can’t
use being ‘spiritual’ as an excuse to let the Church or Temple become run down
(and consequently repelling people away from it.) Keeping the physical state and appearance
goes hand in hand with spirituality.

Well, I got news for you.
Your bodies are temples of God.
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is
in you, whom you have received from God…
Therefore, honor God with your bodies.”
(1 Corinthians 6:19, 20)

Just as you can’t neglect the physical state and appearance
of a church or temple, you can’t neglect the physical state and appearance of
the temple that is your body. You can’t
neglect the physical and justify it by stating that you only need to focus on
the spiritual. When you neglect the
physical, you are not being spiritual.

It pains me to see servants of God neglecting their physical temple, or their health,
becoming overweight and developing serious diseases that are preventable. As “spiritual” as they may be, it baffles me
that they don’t see that the physical goes hand in hand with being spiritual.

So, by now, you know that working on you involves working on
your physical state and appearance. With
that established, let me also say this.
Don’t go overboard on decorating your external appearance.

I could just see someone overcharging her credit cards
buying a lot of brand name clothing and shoes she can’t afford in the name of “working
on the temple”. No, don’t go overboard
to the other extreme! A Church, or a
Temple of God, should not spend their entire budget on the appearance of the
building. Also, it should not overspend
time and effort. In the same way, you
should not over-do it in focusing on your looks. There must be a balance. Don’t go overboard in spending too much time,
effort, and/or money on your appearance.
But don’t spend too little effort like Frank in the upkeep of his
appearance. Either extreme is bad. You should have a balance. Find your balance.

Find your balance of maintaining a more presentable Temple
that is you, but you also need to work on improving the inner you, as I will
talk about in another part of this “The Search for True Love” series.